REVIVING GERMAN-JEWISH COMEDY: DANI LEVY'S FAMILY FARCE GO FOR ZUCKER!

Dani Levy's film Go for Zucker! (2004) won a myriad of prizes in 2005 and was touted as the first Jewish comedy to be produced in Germany since the rise of National Socialism. Critics and scholars who have analysed Levy's popular film tend to focus on its presentation of Jewish characters as something other than victims of the Shoah and on its comic engagement with persistent social and cultural divisions between East and West Germans in post-reunification Germany. What these otherwise valid approaches ignore, however, is an additional historical and cultural layer of interpretation, one that more aptly fulfils Levy's goal of paying homage to pre-Shoah forms of self-deprecating German-Jewish humour. Such examples of the Jewish comedic tradition reach even further back in time than the early twentieth-century films of Ernst Lubitsch and the Hollywood films of Billy Wilder to include turn-of-the-century Jargon theatre and the metropolitan revue show, forms of popular entertainment that thrived in Imperial Berlin and delighted mixed audiences of Jews and Gentiles. By reviving a comic past, in which Jewishness could be staged in a variety of ways without derision, Levy's film provides hope that contemporary Germany might once again become a place where Jewish and non-Jewish Germans can laugh together.     

Correction to: Organizational Benefits of Onboarding Contingent Workers: an Anchoring Model Approach

Journal of Business and Psychology -     

The Role of Affective Instability in Loss of Control Eating in Youth with Overweight/Obesity Across Development: Findings from Two EMA Studies

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Affective instability is common during adolescence, but at high levels it is associated with a variety of internalizing and externalizing...     

Becoming a Caregiver: Experiences of Young Adults Moving into Family Caregiving Roles

Journal of Adult Development - While the vast majority of family caregivers struggle to find balance between different roles in their lives, young adult caregivers are faced with the atypical...     

Race-Related Differences in the Experiences of Family Members of Persons with Mental Illness Participating in the NAMI Family to Family Education Program

Families play an important role in the lives of individuals with mental illness. Coping with the strain of shifting roles and multiple challenges of caregiving can have a huge impact. Limited information exists regarding race-related differences in families’ caregiving experiences, their abilities to cope with the mental illness of a loved one, or their interactions with mental health service systems. This study examined race-related differences in the experiences of adults seeking to participate in the National Alliance on Mental Illness Family-to-Family Education Program due to mental illness of a loved one. Participants were 293 White and 107 African American family members who completed measures of problem- and emotion-focused coping, knowledge about mental illness, subjective illness burden, psychological distress, and family functioning. Multiple regression analyses were used to determine race-related differences. African American caregivers reported higher levels of negative caregiving experiences, less knowledge of mental illness, and higher levels of both problem-solving coping and emotion-focused coping, than White caregivers. Mental health programs serving African American families should consider targeting specific strategies to address caregiving challenges, support their use of existing coping mechanisms and support networks, and increase their knowledge of mental illness.     

Melancholy and happiness

This paper explores an under-theorised phenomenon – the experience of melancholy as an enhancer of happiness. Drawing from philosophy and literature, I define melancholy as an experience that combines the pleasure of feeling sad with sober self-reflection. Despite expectations to the contrary, two potentially positive outcomes of melancholy are identified – insightful pensiveness, and emotional connectedness with loss and pain. These outcomes can enhance happiness as understood in key texts of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, and, consistent with findings in psychology, also have important implications for wider debates in social policy and welfare practice. First, the pensiveness associated with melancholy can make unique contributions to personal insights, and help develop and fulfill ‘authentic happiness’ and ‘informed desires’. These contributions oppose hedonist accounts of happiness, but are conducive to enhancing happiness properly understood. Second, melancholy can also provide a psychologically safe arena for experiencing loss and pain, where a person can more positively accept the limits of the human condition. This acceptance enhances her happiness, as she is better able to live ‘in the moment’ and so derive satisfaction from her presently-orientated activities and commitments.     

Young Children's Self-Generated Object Views and Object Recognition

Two important and related developments in children between 18 and 24 months of age are the rapid expansion of object name vocabularies and the emergence of an ability to recognize objects from sparse representations of their geometric shapes. In the same period, children also begin to show a preference for planar views (i.e., views of objects held perpendicular to the line of sight) of objects they manually explore. Are children's emerging view preferences somehow related to contemporary changes in object name vocabulary and object perception? Children aged 18 to 24 months old explored richly detailed toy objects while wearing a head camera that recorded their object views. Both children's vocabulary size and their success in recognizing sparse three-dimensional representations of the geometric shapes of objects were significantly related to their spontaneous choice of planar views of those objects during exploration. The results suggest important interdependencies among developmental changes in perception, action, word learning, and categorization in very young children.     

Frontotemporal neural systems supporting semantic processing in Alzheimer’s disease

We hypothesized that semantic memory for object concepts involves both representations of visual feature knowledge in modality-specific association cortex and heteromodal regions that are important for integrating and organizing this semantic knowledge so that it can be used in a flexible, contextually appropriate manner. We examined this hypothesis in an fMRI study of mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Participants were presented with pairs of printed words and asked whether the words matched on a given visual–perceptual feature (e.g., guitar, violin: SHAPE). The stimuli probed natural kinds and manufactured objects, and the judgments involved shape or color. We found activation of bilateral ventral temporal cortex and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during semantic judgments, with AD patients showing less activation of these regions than healthy seniors. Moreover, AD patients showed less ventral temporal activation than did healthy seniors for manufactured objects, but not for natural kinds. We also used diffusion-weighted MRI of white matter to examine fractional anisotropy (FA). Patients with AD showed significantly reduced FA in the superior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior frontal-occipital fasciculus, which carry projections linking temporal and frontal regions of this semantic network. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that semantic memory is supported in part by a large-scale neural network involving modality-specific association cortex, heteromodal association cortex, and projections between these regions. The semantic deficit in AD thus arises from gray matter disease that affects the representation of feature knowledge and processing its content, as well as white matter disease that interrupts the integrated functioning of this large-scale network.